Sean Burke The Death and Return of the Author : Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida.

processes which the human mind developed in its adaptation to a world of written text. So far as
our horizons extend, digital technology is the bountiful correlative of graphic culture.
The interiorisation thesis upon which radical conceptions of the digitalised future depend itself
condemns visionaries to falsify a paradigm shift whose promised contours and countries are
necessarily inconceivable. Caught within the ever-recurrent paradox whereby a determinism
cannot be articulated by those who live within its frames, the theorists of hypertext have no
substantial point of recourse except to politicise cyberspace. By way of claims which conflate
readerly and political empowerment, the new technologies are presented as the material
embodiment of the 'Copernican overturning' by which texts revolve around the reader rather than
the author. The 'ultrademocratic' freedom of the reader is opposed to a tyrannically authorcentred
literature which forces the reader down a pre-determined and linear path imposed by
authorial intention. As Landow presents the case:
[the] liberating and empowering quality of hypertext appears in the fact that the reader also writes
and links, for this power, which removes much of the gap in conventional status between reader
and author, permits readers to read actively in an even more powerful way—by annotating
documents, arguing with them, leaving their own traces. As long as any reader has the power to
enter the system and leave his or her mark, neither the tyranny of the center nor that of the
majority can impose itself. The very open-endedness of the text also promotes empowering the
reader. 20
Whilst no-one would dispute the right of the reader to choose his or her own path of reading, it is
credulous to see this as 'empowerment' in the political sphere: the notions of freedom and
empowerment are traduced or trivialised by an 'antihierarchical' argument which never addresses
the economic issue of access, nor the possibility that technoculture might further widen the gap
between affluent and impoverished cultures.
Even when taken on its own—textualist—terms, the argument for the political value of displacing
the author fails to persuade. Authorial ordering is more a way of guiding the reader through a
particular experience than a sovereign claim upon the textual centre. Would we, for example, see
a Dante 'empowered' through being relieved of Virgil in his negotiation of the Inferno, a Theseus
as 'liberated' in the labyrinth by the removal of Ariadne's clew of thread? The 'empowerment' of
the reader is a political act only within a institutional world which takes its own storms and
seasons for the world. In associating itself with a politics of reading, the 'theorisation' of digitalised
technology—something altogether different from the work of those who construct and refine
technologies—disinters some of the most egregiously falsifying arguments for the removal of the
author. Sadie Plant, in a feminist variant on Landow's convergence theory, politicises
technoculture by establishing its essential characteristic as the (essentially feminine) art of
weaving. On the basis of a metaphorical connection between the terms used to describe digital
systems and the specific (industrial) practices of the loom, Plant draws on Irigaray to suggest that
technological change marks a break between a manned past and an unmanned future: 'Just as
weavings and their patterns are repeatable without detracting from the value of the first one
made, digital images complicate the questions of origin and originality, authorship and authority
with which Western conceptions of art have been preoccupied.' 21 Does it not betray a poignant
sense of political ineffectuality for literary criticism to allegorise its own activities in terms of an
oppressive author, an oppressed reader and a politics of reading qua reading? Do we not detect
here an obsession with the politics of the sign which has erased all signs of the political? One can
see the politicisation of reading as symptomatic of a breach—growing since May 1968—between
the world of the institution and the world of external political realities (whose existence so-called
political critics have effectively denied on the grounds of representation being humanist and
illusory). Digital technology represents the latest addition to this tendency: its 'politics' rest on the
assumptions that the medium is the message and that the message is inherently political. Fredric
Jameson, himself a stem critic of technological pretensions to political radicalism, admits the very
principle that allows institutional self-regulation to mask as a political act. If indeed one accepts
that the 'only effective liberation . . . consists in the recognition that there is nothing that is not
social and historical—indeed, that everything is 'in the last analysis' political',22 then nothing can
be falsely political: political significance can be claimed for debates which have not the slightest
relevance to economic, racial, social or sexual equalities, including even that melancholy shift
from the active case of a politics of writing to the passivity of a politics of reading. With admirable